A man put to death in Texas for the killing of four people defiantly maintained his innocence moments before he was executed.
Arthur Brown Jr., 52, received a lethal injection Thursday evening at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
He was condemned for the June 1992 slayings of four people, which took place in a Houston home during a drug robbery.
Shortly after 12.30am UK-time on Friday he was put to death by lethal injection.
Moments before his death he continued to maintain his innocence and said the courts and prosecutors had blocked him from key evidence that he said proved he did not kill on that night.
He said in his final words: “What is occurring here tonight is not justice, it’s murder of an innocent man for a murder that occurred in 1992."
He went on to say: “My co-defendant was executed in 2006 and if I’m innocent he was innocent and they killed an innocent man, and the state doesn’t want the truth to come out.”
He finished his last words by saying: “Tonight, Texas will kill a second innocent man for a murder that occurred in 1992. I have no further words.”
Authorities said Brown was part of a ring that shuttled drugs from Texas to Alabama and had bought drugs from Jose Tovar and his wife Rachel Tovar.
Killed during the drug robbery were 32-year-old Jose Tovar; his wife's 17-year-old son, Frank Farias; 19-year-old Jessica Quinones, the pregnant girlfriend of another son of Rachel Tovar; and 21-year-old neighbour Audrey Brown.
All four had been tied up and shot in the head. Rachel Tovar and another person were also shot but survived.
"I don't see how anybody could have just killed a pregnant woman and then made her suffer so much. It's just beyond words," Quinones' older sister, Maricella Quinones, said before the execution.
Brown was the fifth inmate put to death in Texas this year and the ninth in the U.S. His execution was the second of two in Texas this week. Another inmate, Gary Green, was executed Tuesday for killing his estranged wife and her young daughter.
The U.S. Supreme Court had earlier on Thursday declined an appeal from Brown's attorneys to halt the execution. They had argued that Brown was exempt from execution because he was intellectually disabled, a claim disputed by prosecutors.
The high court has prohibited the death penalty for the intellectually disabled.
"Mr. Brown's intellectual limitations were known to his friends and family. ... Individuals that knew Mr. Brown over the course of his life have described him consistently as "slow", his attorneys wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court.
One of Brown's accomplices in the shootings, Marion Dudley, was executed in 2006. A third partner was sentenced to life in prison.
Brown, who was from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, had long maintained another person committed the killings.
